HARAPPAN TERMINOLOGIES

After the discovery of Harappa in 1921 many sites with same archaeological material have been explored and excavated in India and Pakistan, particularly in Indus and Ghaggar basins; as well as the area of Cholistan in Pakistan and Gujarat in India. The terminology used for this cultural complex is the “Harappan culture”. Sites with the same specific types or classes of artefacts are usually grouped into the same archaeological culture. Archaeologists have further divided the Harappan cultural sequence into three periods i.e.; ‘Pre-Harappan’, ‘Mature Harappan’ and ‘Post-Harappan’. This periodization is based on artefactual material recovered from different sites. But, some scholars used terms like ‘Early-Harappan’ and ‘Late-Harappan’ to indicate the transitional phases between above mentioned three tier periodization. To avoid confusion regarding these terminologies most of the scholars treated ‘Pre-Harappan’ and ‘Early-Harappan’ as the same; and ‘Post-Harappan’ and ‘Late-Harappan’ similarly. But the problems rose with some ‘so called’ Post or Late-Harappan regional cultures like the Bara culture of the Sutlej basin and OCP culture of the Ganga-Yamuna basin. Bara culture which spread over the areas of present day Punjab, Haryana and Western Utter Pradesh existed with Pre-Harappan and Mature Harappan cultures and continued in the Late-Harappan period without any break. The earliest dates for the above culture come from the site of Mahorana in district Sangrur, Punjab i.e. 2300 BCE; is interlocked with Painted Grey ware culture at the site of Bhagwanpura district Kurukshetra, Haryana. Another culture i.e. OCP remains problematic. It doesn’t come up with Pre-Harappan and Harappan by excavation but the dating provided by TL method put it back to the latter half of third millennium BCE. At the same point of time Pre-Harappan and Harappan culture were flourishing in Sutlej and Ghaggar basin. So, the question that arises is that in which particular terminological bracket can these cultures be placed? My paper attempts to look at this problematic issue by taking up the instance of the Bara culture.